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By Tiana Lowe, Washington Examiner
The biggest scandal of Donald Trump's presidency isn't the Russia collusion farce, nor the more serious (but still forgotten) Ukraine controversy that led to his impeachment. It's not the disgraceful tweets accusing a television host of murder, nor even his public petty spats with White House correspondents in the Rose Garden.
No single decision by Trump has cost more in livelihoods and lives than Trump allowing his hand-picked "experts" to spend months lying about the efficacy of masks against the coronavirus.
Trump won the 2016 Republican primary running against our pathologically incompetent "expert" and elite class. In many ways, voters have gotten what they asked for, and in most respects it hasn't turned out badly. But at the most crucial moment of his presidency, Trump handed the reins of public policy to public health career bureaucrats, letting them lie about the one obvious available means of protecting people from the coronavirus without a national lockdown.
Anthony Fauci has now admitted that the decision to downplay the use of masks was a calculated lie.
"[W]e were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply," said the man touted as the nation's leading epidemiology expert in an interview with TheStreet. "And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the healthcare workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected."
So to be clear, the "experts" knew that masks worked, but lied about them anyway so that people wouldn't go out and buy them. Imagine what might have happened if, instead of lying, Fauci et al. had told people from the outset to wear bananas on their faces rather than buy specialized equipment.
Trump meekly allowed this lie, needlessly killing off the best economy in a generation. That is not the decision of a leader. That's not even the decision of a reckless tyrant. That's the decision of a coward unwilling to fulfill his key campaign credo at the moment we needed it the most -- to stand up for the people against corrupt and incompetent elites.
Trump could only do so much about the Chinese Communist Party and its lies that started the global pandemic. He could not overrule the incompetent governors, drunk on their own power, who forced COVID-positive seniors back into nursing homes. And yes, the economy was going to take something of a hit regardless. But on the central question of whether a "noble lie" should be put to the public to discourage the use of life-saving masks so that professionals would have them, the buck stops with him. Fauci and Surgeon General Jerome Adams didn't just say the science behind masks was unclear. As late as March, they were still lying, saying that masks might actually increase your odds of contracting the coronavirus.
The result is unprecedented economic wreckage, in terms of jobs lost, savings consumed, businesses destroyed -- black-owned businesses especially. Did we really have to shut down Alcoholics Anonymous and churches and non-emergency clinics and all the other spaces for addicts, domestic violence victims, and ordinary people in need of comfort and care? Or could we have all just worn masks and allowed these organizations deemed nonessential by our elites to operate outdoors?
Trump let the experts lie to us about masks. That's why we went from "14 days to slow the spread" to three months and 30 million jobs destroyed.
Read more at Washington Examiner
The biggest scandal of Donald Trump's presidency isn't the Russia collusion farce, nor the more serious (but still forgotten) Ukraine controversy that led to his impeachment. It's not the disgraceful tweets accusing a television host of murder, nor even his public petty spats with White House correspondents in the Rose Garden.
No single decision by Trump has cost more in livelihoods and lives than Trump allowing his hand-picked "experts" to spend months lying about the efficacy of masks against the coronavirus.
Trump won the 2016 Republican primary running against our pathologically incompetent "expert" and elite class. In many ways, voters have gotten what they asked for, and in most respects it hasn't turned out badly. But at the most crucial moment of his presidency, Trump handed the reins of public policy to public health career bureaucrats, letting them lie about the one obvious available means of protecting people from the coronavirus without a national lockdown.
Anthony Fauci has now admitted that the decision to downplay the use of masks was a calculated lie.
"[W]e were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply," said the man touted as the nation's leading epidemiology expert in an interview with TheStreet. "And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the healthcare workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected."
So to be clear, the "experts" knew that masks worked, but lied about them anyway so that people wouldn't go out and buy them. Imagine what might have happened if, instead of lying, Fauci et al. had told people from the outset to wear bananas on their faces rather than buy specialized equipment.
Trump meekly allowed this lie, needlessly killing off the best economy in a generation. That is not the decision of a leader. That's not even the decision of a reckless tyrant. That's the decision of a coward unwilling to fulfill his key campaign credo at the moment we needed it the most -- to stand up for the people against corrupt and incompetent elites.
Trump could only do so much about the Chinese Communist Party and its lies that started the global pandemic. He could not overrule the incompetent governors, drunk on their own power, who forced COVID-positive seniors back into nursing homes. And yes, the economy was going to take something of a hit regardless. But on the central question of whether a "noble lie" should be put to the public to discourage the use of life-saving masks so that professionals would have them, the buck stops with him. Fauci and Surgeon General Jerome Adams didn't just say the science behind masks was unclear. As late as March, they were still lying, saying that masks might actually increase your odds of contracting the coronavirus.
The result is unprecedented economic wreckage, in terms of jobs lost, savings consumed, businesses destroyed -- black-owned businesses especially. Did we really have to shut down Alcoholics Anonymous and churches and non-emergency clinics and all the other spaces for addicts, domestic violence victims, and ordinary people in need of comfort and care? Or could we have all just worn masks and allowed these organizations deemed nonessential by our elites to operate outdoors?
Trump let the experts lie to us about masks. That's why we went from "14 days to slow the spread" to three months and 30 million jobs destroyed.
Read more at Washington Examiner
